[PATCH] fs: don't set *REFERENCED on single use objects

[Josef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com>]

By default we set DCACHE_REFERENCED and I_REFERENCED on any dentry or
inode we create.  This is problematic as this means that it takes two
trips through the LRU for any of these objects to be reclaimed,
regardless of their actual lifetime.  With enough pressure from these
caches we can easily evict our working set from page cache with single
use objects.  So instead only set *REFERENCED if we've already been
added to the LRU list.  This means that we've been touched since the
first time we were accessed, and so more likely to need to hang out in
cache.

To illustrate this issue I wrote the following scripts

https://github.com/josefbacik/debug-scripts/tree/master/cache-pressure

on my test box.  It is a single socket 4 core CPU with 16gib of RAM and
I tested on an Intel 2tib NVME drive.  The cache-pressure.sh script
creates a new file system and creates 2 6.5gib files in order to take up
13gib of the 16gib of ram with pagecache.  Then it runs a test program
that reads these 2 files in a loop, and keeps track of how often it has
to read bytes for each loop.  On an ideal system with no pressure we
should have to read 0 bytes indefinitely.  The second thing this script
does is start a fs_mark job that creates a ton of 0 length files,
putting pressure on the system with slab only allocations.  On exit the
script prints out how many bytes were read by the read-file program.
The results are as follows

Without patch:
/mnt/btrfs-test/reads/file1: total read during loops 27262988288
/mnt/btrfs-test/reads/file2: total read during loops 27262976000

With patch:
/mnt/btrfs-test/reads/file2: total read during loops 18640457728
/mnt/btrfs-test/reads/file1: total read during loops 9565376512

This patch results in a 50% reduction of the amount of pages evicted
from our working set.

Signed-off-by: Josef Bacik <jbacik@fb.com>
---
 fs/dcache.c | 4 ++--
 fs/inode.c  | 3 ++-
 2 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/fs/dcache.c b/fs/dcache.c
index 95d71ed..cddf397 100644
--- a/fs/dcache.c
+++ b/fs/dcache.c
@@ -419,6 +419,8 @@ static void dentry_lru_add(struct dentry *dentry)
 {
 	if (unlikely(!(dentry->d_flags & DCACHE_LRU_LIST)))
 		d_lru_add(dentry);
+	else if (unlikely(!(dentry->d_flags & DCACHE_REFERENCED)))
+		dentry->d_flags |= DCACHE_REFERENCED;
 }
 
 /**
@@ -779,8 +781,6 @@ void dput(struct dentry *dentry)
 			goto kill_it;
 	}
 
-	if (!(dentry->d_flags & DCACHE_REFERENCED))
-		dentry->d_flags |= DCACHE_REFERENCED;
 	dentry_lru_add(dentry);
 
 	dentry->d_lockref.count--;
diff --git a/fs/inode.c b/fs/inode.c
index 88110fd..9dfa8f1 100644
--- a/fs/inode.c
+++ b/fs/inode.c
@@ -405,6 +405,8 @@ static void inode_lru_list_add(struct inode *inode)
 {
 	if (list_lru_add(&inode->i_sb->s_inode_lru, &inode->i_lru))
 		this_cpu_inc(nr_unused);
+	else
+		inode->i_state |= I_REFERENCED;
 }
 
 /*
@@ -1492,7 +1494,6 @@ static void iput_final(struct inode *inode)
 		drop = generic_drop_inode(inode);
 
 	if (!drop && (sb->s_flags & MS_ACTIVE)) {
-		inode->i_state |= I_REFERENCED;
 		inode_add_lru(inode);
 		spin_unlock(&inode->i_lock);
 		return;
-- 
2.7.4